During the second quarter of 2013 sales of Android-powered tablets surpassed iOS-based ones in volume for the first time and in terms of revenue there was a 50-50 split between Apple and Android.

The figures come from technology market intelligence company ABI Research, which reported that overall shipments of tablets in the quarter April to June dropped 17% over the January to March one while growing 23% year-over-year for the same quarterly period. In terms of revenue, Apple received $6.3 billion of the $12.7 billion total.

ABI's senior practice director Jeff Orr commented:

“Smaller 7-inch class tablets are finally the majority of shipments. The 7.9-inch iPad mini represented about 60% of total iPad shipments and 49% of iPad-related device revenues in the quarter.”

Due to the shift to the iPad mini the average selling price of iPad's dropped 17% during the quarter, while the introduction of more up-market Android tablets meant that its average price increased by the same percentage.

Of course, given that the way the Android tablets come from many manufacturers, see Android Fragmentation Visualized, the iPad and the iPad Mini remain the most popular tablet models but in terms of platform Android now dominates in the tablet market just as it does on smartphones:

This graph shows how Android achieved this dominance in the global smartphone market and is included in a new report from BI Intelligence which as well as indicating that Android is running on 80% of smartphones, states it is on 76% of mobile devices and 60% of all computing devices in circulation (tablets, smartphones, and PCs combined). This gives it even greater and quicker dominance than suggested by Gartner in the forecast it published in April.

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